Russian To Judgment, Con't

Jason Leopold at BuzzFeed News has been following the case of the mysterious death of Russia Today founder Mikhail Lesin for a couple of years now. Lesin was found dead in a DC hotel room in 2015, his death was officially ruled an accident due to a drunker bender where he fell down repeatedly and not, as pretty much anyone with a pulse has surmised, beaten to death by Putin's goons on the eve of meeting with Obama DoJ officials to explain how RT was Kremlin propaganda at its finest.

Vladimir Putin’s former media czar was murdered in Washington, DC, on the eve of a planned meeting with the US Justice Department, according to two FBI agents whose assertions cast new doubts on the US government’s official explanation of his death. 

Mikhail Lesin’s battered body was discovered in his Dupont Circle hotel room on the morning of Nov. 5, 2015, with blunt-force injuries to the head, neck, and torso. After an almost yearlong "comprehensive investigation," a federal prosecutor announced last October that Lesin died alone in his room due to a series of drunken falls “after days of excessive consumption of alcohol.” His death was ruled an "accident," and prosecutors closed the case. 

But the two FBI agents — as well as a third agent and a serving US intelligence officer — said Lesin was actually bludgeoned to death. None of these officials were directly involved in the government’s investigation, but they said they learned about it from colleagues who were. 

“Lesin was beaten to death,” one of the FBI agents said. “I would implore you to say as much. There seems to be an effort here to cover up that fact for reasons I can't get into.”

Now Leopold and his team not only believe the FBI knows that Lesin's death was homicide by Russian diktat, but that at least one report in the FBI's possession on Lesin's Unfortunate Series Of Events™ was written by our good friend, Christopher Steele of Steele dossier fame.

The FBI possesses a secret report asserting that Vladimir Putin’s former media czar was beaten to death by hired thugs in Washington, DC — directly contradicting the US government’s official finding that Mikhail Lesin died by accident. 

The report, according to four sources who have read all or parts of it, was written by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, who also wrote the famous dossier alleging that Russia had been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” Donald Trump. The bureau received his report while it was helping the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department investigate the Russian media baron’s death, the sources said. 

FBI spokesperson Andrew Ames declined to confirm or deny the existence of the report and would not comment for this story. Steele's business partner, Chris Burrows, declined to comment on behalf of Steele and their company, Orbis Business Intelligence. 

The new revelations come as concerns about Russia’s meddling in the West have intensified to a pitch not seen since the Cold War. Both the UK and the US have blamed the Kremlin for poisoning former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England this month, using a rare nerve agent that endangered bystanders. (Russia has denied it was behind the poisoning.) In the wake of that attack, the British government has opened a review of all 14 suspicious deaths linked to Russia that a BuzzFeed News investigation exposed last year. 

The BuzzFeed News series also revealed new details about Lesin — including that he died on the eve of a scheduled meeting with US Justice Department officials. They had planned to interview Lesin about the inner workings of RT, the Kremlin-funded network that he founded. 

Now BuzzFeed News has established:

• Steele’s report says that Lesin was bludgeoned to death by enforcers working for an oligarch close to Putin, the four sources said.
• The thugs had been instructed to beat Lesin, not kill him, but they went too far, the sources said Steele wrote.
• Three of the sources said that the report described the killers as Russian state security agents moonlighting for the oligarch.

The Steele report is not the FBI's only source for this account of Lesin's death: Three other people, acting independently from Steele, said they also told the FBI that Lesin had been bludgeoned to death by enforcers working for the same oligarch named by Steele. 

Lesin’s corpse was found in a Washington, DC, hotel room on the morning of Nov. 5, 2015. The coroner determined that he had died from blunt force injuries to the head and had also sustained blunt force injuries to his neck, torso, upper extremities, and lower extremities. After an 11-month investigation, a federal prosecutor announced in late 2016 that Lesin died alone in his room due to a series of drunken falls “after days of excessive consumption of alcohol.” His death was ruled an “accident,” with the coroner adding acute alcohol intoxication as a contributing cause of death, and prosecutors closed the case.

So yes, the FBI knows damn well that Lesin was murdered but covered it up anyway, they knew in 2015.  Vlad's little team of tyrants can do whatever they want, it seems.  He doesn't care.

And we have a man in the Oval office wholly owned by Putin.  Never forget that.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Democrats are going to gain seats in November, the question is how many.  A big part of it will come down to Pennsylvania's recently cracked gerrymandering wall, but dozens of other states have districts that give the the maximum possible advantage to keeping GOP seats safe and even with the double digit advantage that Democrats have in generic ballots, it may still not be enough for Team Blue to win back the House.

A report released Monday suggests Democrats might have to temper their enthusiasm about climbing back to power during this year’s midterm elections. 

To win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats would need a tremendous electoral wave not seen in more than 40 years to overcome Republican advantages from gerrymandered districts in key states, according to an analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice. 

The report projects that Democrats would need to win the national popular vote for congressional districts by a nearly 11 percentage point margin over Republicans to gain more than the roughly two dozen seats they need to flip control of the Republican-led chamber. 

That would take more than the typical Democratic wave that history suggests would occur for the party out of power during a midterm election. 

“It would be the equivalent of a tsunami,” said Michael Li, a senior counsel who heads up redistricting work for the center, which is based at New York University School of Law. “Democrats would have to win larger than any sort of recent midterm wave — almost double what they got in 2006 — in order to win a narrow majority.” 

The Brennan Center opposes what it calls “extreme gerrymandering” in which political parties draw legislative districts that virtually ensure they will hold on to power. 

The center has filed a court brief in a case to be heard Wednesday by the U.S. Supreme Court supporting a lawsuit by Republicans alleging that Maryland’s former Democratic governor and legislature unconstitutionally gerrymandered a congressional district to their advantage. 

It also has filed court briefs supporting Democratic lawsuits alleging unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering by Republicans in states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. 

The center’s analysis notes that Democrats gained 31 seats when they won the national congressional vote by 5.4 percentage points in 2006. Yet under the current districts, which were redrawn after the 2010 Census under GOP control of many state capitols, a similar national victory margin in the November election is projected to net Democrats only about a dozen new seats. 

The report projects that a 10 percentage point national margin would gain 21 seats for Democrats — still shy of the 23 or 24 needed to claim a House majority. An 11-point margin is projected to gain 28 seats for Democrats, but they haven’t achieved such a large midterm victory since a nearly 14 point margin gained them 49 seats in 1974. 

“Even a strong blue wave would crash against a wall of gerrymandered maps,” the Brennan Center report says.

We'll see where this stands.  Again, the Brennan Center report doesn't take into account the changes in Pennsylvania, which would add three or four seats to this total if everything works out.  But still, even with a double digit win and all 435 House seats up for re-election in November, Dems are still going to have at best a narrow majority, that's how bad Republican gerrymandering is, and never forget America gave them the keys to the kingdom in 2010 to do it when people decided they were disappointed in Obama.

Bet you wish you still had him, huh?

As LOLGOP points out at Eclectablog, the system is rigged...for Republicans and that's why we have to assume we have to fight for every seat, every inch, every race, every time.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a 2.1 percent while losing the Electoral College. That means Democrats would need to improve upon her margin by at least 3 times and as much as 5 times. This, of course, is all an inexact science as many districts won’t be contended at all and it’s almost impossible to properly poll 438 districts. But you get the idea: House Republicans could get millions fewer votes than their opponents and still end up with the majority and possibly even a larger Senate majority. Then, watch out. 

The goal here isn’t to bum you out, but to be realistic. 

We have to keep in mind all the advantages the GOP has when it comes to the maps, the cash and levers of government it controls. No matter what, Republicans start off with a 6 percent advantage, at least, considering that GOP House candidates took in 1.1 percent more votes than Democrats in 2016. 

Why be realistic? 

Because we learned three things 2016 we cannot ever forget:
1. Never trust good news and positive poll models.
2. Don’t count on Trump to self-destruct.
3. Assume that every mechanism that can be used against us — from hacks to Facebook to voter suppression to the FBI — will. 

Bad news is your friend. Love it. Need it. And every time you see it, do everything you can to swing at least one district.

I know it's hard to stay motivated, to stay in the fight.  Here in KY-4 it's not looking good to unseat national embarrassment Thomas Massie, but KY-6 is definitely in play, and across the river so is OH-1. 

Put resources where they can do the most good.

StupidiNews!

• The FBI is analyzing several suspicious packages sent to DC-area military bases and CIA headquarters, the devices contained black powder and were not considered lethal.
• Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has suspended ride-sharing company Uber's autonomous vehicle testing in the state after a fatal crash last week killed a pedestrian.
• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he will send a top executive to speak to a British Parliament inquiry, but he will not answer questions himself involving Cambridge Analytica.
• China isn't choosing to confirm that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is visiting Beijing by train in what would be his first trip outside North Korea since becoming leader.
• A new study finds that kids with autism aren't getting vaccination shots as much as other children, suggesting a false link between autism and vaccines is still affecting parental decisions.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

Some more information on that now not-so-secret 2016 foreign fundraising meeting in the Seychelles between Erik Prince and the Russians on Trump's behalf, brokered by the UAE today.  Robert Mueller has the broker in question, Emirati businessman George Nader, in pocket as a cooperating witness.

Now we discover that the GOP Congress was possibly in on the scam too, in what's looking like a major pay-for-play for the Republican party and US/Saudi/UAE policy towards Qatar.

A top fundraiser for President Donald Trump received millions of dollars from a political adviser to the United Arab Emirates last April, just weeks before he began handing out a series of large political donations to U.S. lawmakers considering legislation targeting Qatar, the UAE’s chief rival in the Persian Gulf, an Associated Press investigation has found. 

George Nader, an adviser to the UAE who is now a witness in the U.S. special counsel investigation into foreign meddling in American politics, wired $2.5 million to the Trump fundraiser, Elliott Broidy, through a company in Canada, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. They said Nader paid the money to Broidy to bankroll an effort to persuade the U.S. to take a hard line against Qatar, a long-time American ally but now a bitter adversary of the UAE. 

A month after he received the money, Broidy sponsored a conference on Qatar’s alleged ties to Islamic extremism. During the event, Republican Congressman Ed Royce of California, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, announced he was introducing legislation that would brand Qatar as a terrorist-supporting state. 

In July 2017, two months after Royce introduced the bill, Broidy gave the California congressman $5,400 in campaign gifts — the maximum allowed by law. The donations were part of just under $600,000 that Broidy has given to GOP members of Congress and Republican political committees since he began the push for the legislation fingering Qatar, according to an AP analysis of campaign finance disclosure records. 

Broidy said in a statement to AP that he has been outspoken for years about militant groups, including Hamas. 

“I’ve both raised money for, and contributed my own money to, efforts by think tanks to bring the facts into the open, since Qatar is spreading millions of dollars around Washington to whitewash its image as a terror-sponsoring state,” he said. “I’ve also spoken to like-minded members of Congress, like Royce, about how to make sure Qatar’s lobbying money does not blind lawmakers to the facts about its record in supporting terrorist groups.” 

While Washington is awash with political donations from all manner of interest groups and individuals, there are strict restrictions on foreign donations for political activity. Agents of foreign governments are also required to register before lobbying so that there is a public record of foreign influence. 

Cory Fritz, a spokesman for Royce, said that his boss had long criticized the “destabilizing role of extremist elements in Qatar.” He pointed to comments to that effect going back to 2014. “Any attempts to influence these longstanding views would have been unsuccessful,” he said. 

In October, Broidy also raised the issue of Qatar at the White House in meetings with Trump and senior aides.

Remember, the whole unregistered foreign agent thing is the same issue that tripped up Michael Flynn, but the bigger issue is that it looks like the UAE, through Nader, sent millions of dollars to a major Trump fundraiser to buy GOP sanctions of Qatar and got them.

And remember, Mueller has Nader in the palm of his hand.

Stay tuned.

Mad Dog Versus The Mustache

I know that the conventional wisdom is that incoming National Security Adviser John Bolton will be whispering sweet war stories in Trump's ear, and there's very good reason to believe that Bolton being a part of the regime dramatically increases the odds of America going to war during Trump's term.  But what does Defense Secretary Jim Mattis think of all this?

Yeah, there's a reason he's called Mad Dog, the guy definitely knows his way around a sand table or two and didn't exactly shy from blowing stuff up as Obama's CENTCOM head.  The guy's record goes all the way back to the first Gulf War as a battalion commander with the Marines. He's seen the elephant, and he's put men in harm's way and seen some of them not come home.

And you know what?  He doesn't like John Bolton one bit.

Washington is now consumed by a debate over whether Mr. Trump’s new team plans to govern as far to the right as it talks.

So far, the incoming national security adviser, John R. Bolton, has declared that his past comments are “behind me.” Hours after his selection was announced, Mr. Bolton vowed that he would find ways to execute the policies that Mr. Trump was elected on, but that he would not tolerate slow-walking and leaks from bureaucrats he dismissed as “munchkins.”

Some who know Mr. Bolton and his operating style predict titanic clashes.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the retired general who has argued for keeping the Iran deal intact and warned that military confrontation with North Korea would result in “the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes,” told colleagues on Friday that he did not know if he could work with Mr. Bolton. The White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, another retired four-star general, was also unenthusiastic about Mr. Bolton’s hiring.

I've given up on Kelly, he's an unapologetic racist asshole anyway.  But Mattis is the guy actually running the Pentagon, and I'm hoping he'll put a leash on Bolton.

The problem is that's what McMaster was supposed to do as NSA and he's gone, the triumvirate of "Trump's generals" were supposed to be the "adults in the room" protecting America from Trump's worst impulses.

That's not coming to pass.  One is gone.  One has been rumored on the way out for months.  Only Mattis seems to be the stable one.

Last July, James Mattis and Rex Tillerson arranged a tutoring session at the Pentagon for President Donald Trump in the secure, windowless meeting room known as “The Tank.” The plan was to lay out why American troops are deployed in far-flung places across the globe, like Japan and South Korea. Mattis spoke first.

“The postwar, rules-based international order is the greatest gift of the greatest generation,” Mattis told the president, according to two meeting attendees. The secretary of defense walked the president through the complex fabric of trade deals, military agreements and international alliances that make up the global system the victors established after World War II, touching off what one attendee described as a “food fight” and a “free for all” with the president and the rest of the group. Trump punctuated the session by loudly telling his secretaries of state and defense, at several points during the meeting, “I don’t agree!” The meeting culminated with Tillerson, his now ousted secretary of state, fatefully complaining after the president left the room, that Trump was “a fucking moron.”

Trump is said to divide the members of his Cabinet into first-tier “killers” and second-tier “winners.” Mattis is indisputably a killer, but he’s also something rarer: a sometime loser — of policy arguments, that is — who manages to disagree with the president without squandering his clout or getting under Trump’s skin. He opposed Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate change accord, decertify the Iran deal, slap tariffs on steel and aluminum, and move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He opposes the president’s proposed ban on transgender service members and has reportedly ignored requests from the White House to see plans for a military strike against North Korea.

Yet Mattis has been able to present the president with views he doesn’t like without bearing the brunt of his frustration. The departure of H.R. McMaster, his national security adviser, was announced Thursday amid rumors that the president is poised to fire beleaguered Cabinet secretaries like David Shulkin of Veterans Affairs and Ben Carson of Housing and Urban Development, and is agonizing over whether to dismiss John Kelly, his chief of staff. Mattis’ name has been conspicuously absent. One senior administration official called him “bulletproof.”

Of the Cabinet selections and staff picks cheered by Trump critics, including McMaster, Kelly and former chairman of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, Mattis is the only one who seems to still have job security. Trump remains as enthused about Mattis, one of his first Cabinet picks, as he was when he tapped him for the job in December 2016, according to several White House aides.

For now.

The one thing standing between Trump and war with Iran and North Korea is a guy nicknamed "Mad Dog".

Let that sink in.

Trump Faces The Storm

Anderson Cooper's 60 Minutes interview with Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who alleges an affair with Donald Trump and a forced non-disclosure agreement to keep the story of that affair out of the papers during the 2016 election, did not disappoint.

Anderson Cooper: For sitting here talking to me today you could be fined a million dollars I mean aren't you taking a big risk?

Stormy Daniels: I am.

Anderson Cooper: I guess I'm not 100% sure on why you're doing this.

Stormy Daniels: Because it was very important to me to be able to defend myself

Anderson Cooper: Is part of talking w-- wanting to set the record straight?

Stormy Daniels: 100%.

Anderson Cooper: Why does the record need to be set straight?

Stormy Daniels: Because people are just saying whatever they wanted to say about me, I was perfectly fine saying nothing at all, but I'm not okay with being made out to be a liar, or people thinking that I did this for money and people are like, "Oh, you're an opportunist. You're taking advantage of this. Yes, I'm getting more job offers now, but tell me one person who would turn down a job offer making more than they've been making, doing the same thing that they've always done?

Anderson Cooper: A lotta people are using you for a lotta different agendas.

Stormy Daniels: They're trying to. Like, oh, you know, Stormy Daniels comes out #MeToo. This is not a 'Me Too.' I was not a victim. I've never said I was a victim. I think trying to use me to-- to further someone else's agenda, does horrible damage to people who are true victims.

Stormy Daniels' real name is Stephanie Clifford. She's 39 years old, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and has been acting in, directing, and writing adult films for nearly 20 years. She was one of the most popular actresses in the adult industry when she was introduced to Mr. Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in July, 2006. She says he invited her to dinner, and she met him at his hotel suite.

Anderson Cooper: How was the conversation?

Stormy Daniels: Ummm (LAUGH) it started off-- all about him just talking about himself. And he's like-- "Have you seen my new magazine?

With Trump it's always about ego, never forget that.  Here's the part that should end his presidency:

According to Daniels, Mr. Trump called her the following month to say he'd not been able to get her a spot on Celebrity Apprentice. She says they never met again and only had sex in that first meeting in 2006. In May 2011, Daniels agreed to tell her story to a sister publication of In Touch magazine for $15,000 dollars. Two former employees of the magazine told us the story never ran because after the magazine called Mr. Trump seeking comment, his attorney Michael Cohen threatened to sue. Daniels says she was never paid, and says a few weeks later, she was threatened by a man who approached her in Las Vegas.

Stormy Daniels: I was in a parking lot, going to a fitness class with my infant daughter. T-- taking, you know, the seats facing backwards in the backseat, diaper bag, you know, gettin' all the stuff out. And a guy walked up on me and said to me, "Leave Trump alone. Forget the story." And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, "That's a beautiful little girl. It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom." And then he was gone.

Anderson Cooper: You took it as a direct threat?

Stormy Daniels: Absolutely.

Stormy Daniels: I was rattled. I remember going into the workout class. And my hands are shaking so much, I was afraid I was gonna-- drop her.

Anderson Cooper: Did you ever see that person again?

Stormy Daniels: No. But I-- if I did, I would know it right away.

Anderson Cooper: You'd be able to-- you'd be able to recognize that person?

Stormy Daniels: 100%. Even now, all these years later. If he walked in this door right now, I would instantly know.

Anderson Cooper: Did you go to the police?

Stormy Daniels: No.

Anderson Cooper: Why?

Stormy Daniels: Because I was scared.

The only thing more consistent that Trump's feast of ego is the way he treats women.  They're not mutually exclusive things, either. 

Oh, and I bet she's been shown the picture of the man who threatened her in Las Vegas, and she and her lawyer know precisely who that individual is.  She wants Trump to know she's aware of that man's identity too, count on that.

On top of the moral implications, remember that John Edwards was indicted in 2011 for using campaign funds to pay off his mistress to keep silent about their affair during the 2008 campaign, and Edwards was acquitted on the one of the charges and a mistrial was declared for the rest.  His career is over in politics and as far as I know he's still a trial lawyer in NC.

There's a near 100% chance that Trump did the exact same thing as Edwards, Russia, money laundering, obstruction of justice or not.

StupidiNews!

• Egyptian voters go to the polls today to elect a President, but current President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is expected to easily win another term as he has limited opposition.
• Gun manufacturer Remington is expected to file for bankruptcy today as the nation's oldest gunmaker is drowning in more than $700 million in debt.
• The former president of Catalan is due in a German court for an extradition hearing as Spain is  seeking charges against Carles Puidgemont for sedition, rebellion and embezzlement. 
• Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin says the US is looking for a bilateral trade deal with Beijing to prevent $50 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods and avert a possible global trade war.
• Cook County, Illinois is joining the half-dozen federal lawsuits against Cambridge Analytica as the data analytics company is being sued over the theft of 50 million Facebook profiles.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

We've gotten to the point to where Donald Trump is in so much legal trouble right now that he can't find any lawyers willing to defend him against Mueller after firing his previous legal counsel.

President Trump has decided not to hire two lawyers who were announced last week as new additions to his legal team, leaving him with a shrinking stable of lawyers as the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, enters an intense phase.

“The president is disappointed that conflicts prevent Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing from joining the president’s special counsel legal team,” Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, said in a statement on Sunday morning. “However, those conflicts do not prevent them from assisting the president in other legal matters. The president looks forward to working with them.”

The upheaval on the legal team comes at a critical time for Mr. Trump. The president’s former lead lawyer, John Dowd, quit the team on Thursday, just as Mr. Trump is deciding whether to sit with Mr. Mueller for an interview. At the moment, Mr. Sekulow is the president’s chief outside lawyer, as Mr. Trump’s longtime New York lawyer, Marc E. Kasowitz, remains on the periphery.

While Mr. Trump’s lawyers, including Mr. Dowd, had told the president that the investigation would be over by this point, it seems to be accelerating, as Mr. Mueller appears to be looking into a wide range of matters related to Mr. Trump’s corporate activities, his 2016 campaign, his associates and his time in office.

The president met with Mr. diGenova and Ms. Toensing, who are married, in recent days to discuss the possibility that they would join his legal team in the Mueller case. According to two people told of details about the meeting, the president did not believe he had personal chemistry with Mr. diGenova and Ms. Toensing.


Mr. Corallo has told investigators that he was concerned that a close aide to Mr. Trump, Hope Hicks, may have been planning to obstruct justice during the drafting of a statement about a meeting between a Russian lawyer and Donald Trump Jr. during the campaign.

Ms. Hicks’s lawyer has strongly denied that suggestion, and White House aides said Mr. Corallo’s assertion had come up in discussions with the president as he weighed whether to go ahead with Mr. diGenova and Ms. Toensing.

If you're a right-wing lawyer and you are given the chance to work with the White House legal team, there's only one reason to turn the offer from the Oval Office down: you can't win the case and that your client is guilty, furthermore it means that your client is going to ask you to do something that will most likely get you disbarred or worse.

When these two FOX News legal eagles realized what they were up against, the full power of Robert ueller and his special counsel all-star team, they ran for the hills rather than defend Trump, citing "conflicts".

There's no conflict when the White House offers you a job.  You drop everything and take it, including your current clients...unless that White House has Donald Trump in it.

To me, this says more than anything that Mueller has Trump dead to rights, and that his legal team has no chance in hell of saving him from what's coming.

Scott Walker In "Stealing Wisconsin"

Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker and state Republicans refused to hold special elections to fill two open seats in the state, citing the "costs" of special elections.  A Madison judge disagreed and mandated Walker to hold the elections anyway.

Now Wisconsin Republicans say they will openly defy that court order and instead simply change the law to make not holding them perfectly legal rather than risk giving Democrats an advantage.

Wisconsin Republicans signaled Friday that they will hold a special election to change election law rather than face special elections in two heavily Republican legislative districts.

On Thursday, Dane County Circuit Judge Josann Reynolds ordered Gov. Scott Walker (R) to call special elections in two legislative districts that have been vacant for months.

Walker's attorneys had argued state election law did not require him to fill the seats, because they were made vacant during an off year. The legislators who occupied both seats quit to take jobs in Walker's administration.

But the judge rejected those arguments, ruling in favor of voters from both districts and the National Democratic Redistricting Trust, a group led by former Attorney General Eric Holder, who argued that Walker's refusal to call special elections denied voters their right to representation in Madison.

Reynolds, who was appointed to the bench by Walker, ordered the governor to declare vacancies next week, thus setting up special elections that would be held later this spring or summer.

But in a joint statement released Friday, Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) and state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R) said they would ask Walker to call the legislature back into session in order to change Wisconsin's special election law.

"After consulting with [the state Department of Justice] and others, we have decided it's best to move forward on an extraordinary session in order to clean up the statute on special elections and ensure that it aligns with the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act," Vos and Fitzgerald said.

And these are two Republican state districts, but Walker simply doesn't want to take the chance that Democrats might win in a year where a blue wave is coming, pure and simple.

Republicans would rather not hold elections then risk Democrats winning.  That's something fascist tyrants do, so congratulations, Wisconsin.  You live in an authoritarian regime.

What do you plan to do about it?

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Conor Lamb's victory in PA-18's special election earlier this month has broken the dam on Republican retirements.  GOP House members are running for the hills, and nowhere is it more apparent than in Pennsylvania itself, where newly redrawn competitive districts across the state are forcing Republicans like Rep. Ryan Costello into retiring completely.

Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Ryan Costello will not seek reelection to his district in 2018 as he faces a difficult midterm race in a district with a growing Democratic voter base, City & State Pennsylvania reported Saturday.

Despite having filed this week to run in the GOP primary for the state's 6th District in May, Costello told state and local Republican officials that he plans to drop out in the weeks before then, unidentified sources told the news outlet.
Costello reportedly met with former 6th District Rep. Jim Gerlach (R) and the state GOP chairman about the decision Friday, which he said would avoid a costly defeat for the party in the coming months.

The Pennsylvania Republican has been rumored to be considering retirement from the Philadelphia-suburban area hit hard by a recent redrawing of the state's congressional districts.

The redraw, forced by the state Supreme Court after determining the old congressional map was unconstitutional, raised doubts as to whether Costello could hold on in the competitive swing counties surrounding Philadelphia.

The district went from being one that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won by just 1 point in 2016 to one she would have won by 9 points, ABC News reported.

And given the massive disadvantage Trump is going to be in November, Republicans are going to kiss this district and dozens more beside it goodbye.

Sunday Long Read: The Big Blue Bully

This week's Sunday Long Read is ProPublica's investigation into the original American tech giant: IBM's shady practices towards firing its senior employees in the last several years allowed it to circumvent age discrimination laws and dump thousands of workers in exchange for younger, cheaper labor brought in on HB-1 tech visas.

FOR NEARLY A HALF CENTURY, IBM came as close as any company to bearing the torch for the American Dream. 

As the world’s dominant technology firm, payrolls at International Business Machines Corp. swelled to nearly a quarter-million U.S. white-collar workers in the 1980s. Its profits helped underwrite a broad agenda of racial equality, equal pay for women and an unbeatable offer of great wages and something close to lifetime employment, all in return for unswerving loyalty.

But when high tech suddenly started shifting and companies went global, IBM faced the changing landscape with a distinction most of its fiercest competitors didn’t have: a large number of experienced and aging U.S. employees. 

The company reacted with a strategy that, in the words of one confidential planning document, would “correct seniority mix.” It slashed IBM’s U.S. workforce by as much as three-quarters from its 1980s peak, replacing a substantial share with younger, less-experienced and lower-paid workers and sending many positions overseas. ProPublica estimates that in the past five years alone, IBM has eliminated more than 20,000 American employees ages 40 and over, about 60 percent of its estimated total U.S. job cuts during those years. 

In making these cuts, IBM has flouted or outflanked U.S. laws and regulations intended to protect later-career workers from age discrimination, according to a ProPublica review of internal company documents, legal filings and public records, as well as information provided via interviews and questionnaires filled out by more than 1,000 former IBM employees. 

Among ProPublica’s findings, IBM: 

• Denied older workers information the law says they need in order to decide whether they’ve been victims of age bias, and required them to sign away the right to go to court or join with others to seek redress.
• Targeted people for layoffs and firings with techniques that tilted against older workers, even when the company rated them high performers. In some instances, the money saved from the departures went toward hiring young replacements.
• Converted job cuts into retirements and took steps to boost resignations and firings. The moves reduced the number of employees counted as layoffs, where high numbers can trigger public disclosure requirements.
• Encouraged employees targeted for layoff to apply for other IBM positions, while quietly advising managers not to hire them and requiring many of the workers to train their replacements.
• Told some older employees being laid off that their skills were out of date, but then brought them back as contract workers, often for the same work at lower pay and fewer benefits.

IBM declined requests for the numbers or age breakdown of its job cuts. ProPublica provided the company with a 10-page summary of its findings and the evidence on which they were based. IBM spokesman Edward Barbini said that to respond the company needed to see copies of all documents cited in the story, a request ProPublica could not fulfill without breaking faith with its sources. Instead, ProPublica provided IBM with detailed descriptions of the paperwork. Barbini declined to address the documents or answer specific questions about the firm’s policies and practices, and instead issued the following statement: 

“We are proud of our company and our employees’ ability to reinvent themselves era after era, while always complying with the law. Our ability to do this is why we are the only tech company that has not only survived but thrived for more than 100 years.”
With nearly 400,000 people worldwide, and tens of thousands still in the U.S., IBM remains a corporate giant. How it handles the shift from its veteran baby-boom workforce to younger generations will likely influence what other employers do. And the way it treats its experienced workers will eventually affect younger IBM employees as they too age.

Nobody should be surprised by this, IBM has long been the champion of America's bad-boy tech giants.  The only reason Google and Facebook hasn't had to fire senior engineers at this pace is because those companies don't hire IT workers over 40 to begin with.

Nobody does.

Did I mention I'm an IT worker over 40?

Just putting that out there in case you think the problem is limited to Big Blue.

Last Call For Iran Into Donald, Con't

On Friday, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein announced that nine Iranians have been indicted for hacking into US government agencies and multiple university systems and making off with tons of information in a multi-year operation funded by Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

The United States on Friday announced criminal charges and sanctions against nine Iranians and an Iranian company for attempting to hack into hundreds of universities worldwide, dozens of companies and parts of the U.S. government, including its main energy regulator, on behalf of Tehran’s government.

The cyber attacks, beginning in at least 2013, pilfered more than 31 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property from 144 U.S. universities and 176 universities in 21 other countries, the U.S. Department of Justice said, describing the conspiracy as one of the largest state-sponsored hacking sprees prosecuted.
The U.S. Treasury Department said that it was placing sanctions on the nine accused individuals and the Mabna Institute, a company described by U.S. prosecutors as designed to help Iranian research organizations steal information.

“These defendants are now fugitives of justice,” U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said at a press conference. Rosenstein said they may face extradition in more than 100 countries if they travel outside of Iran. 

The hackers were not accused of being directly employed by Iran’s government. They were instead charged with criminal conduct waged primarily through the Mabna Institute on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite military force assigned to defend Iran’s Shi’ite theocracy from internal and external threats.

There was no immediate response to the charges and sanctions in Iran’s state-run media. 

Hackers targeted email accounts of more than 100,000 professors worldwide and compromised about 8,000 of them, prosecutors said. Hackers also targeted the U.S. Labor Department, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the United Nations and the computer systems of the U.S. states Hawaii and Indiana, prosecutors said. 

Friday’s actions are part of an effort by senior cyber security officials at the White House and across the U.S. government to blame foreign countries for malicious hacks.

Three observations here about this story:

1) If Rod Rosenstein wanted cover from Trump's capricious ire, "indicting Iranian hackers in a major operation that started under Obama's watch" is about as high on the list as he could have gone, short of actually firing Mueller.  In a real way, Rosenstein's announcement may have saved his job.  For now.

2) With this coming the day after John Bolton's Mustache was announced as the next National Security Adviser, let's recall that the Trump regime's latest nuclear posture review included the desire to use military action, up to and including the deployment of "strategic weapons", in response to cyber attacks by nation states.  Rosenstein conceivably just gave these asshole a pretext for war.  Maybe nuclear war.  Hell, I don't know.

3) But the DoJ investigating Iran's Revolutionary Guard's money trail is a double-bladed sword for Trump and he knows it. Last March's revelations that Ivanka Trump was involved heavily in a failed Trump Tower project in Baku, Azerbaijan that was really a money laundering front for the RG suddenly takes on a whole new level of importance, especially after this announcement.  And of course, Robert Mueller knows what Rosenstein knows.

It's a complex and complicated subject, but the upshot is that while this was coming for a long time, the timing and method of the announcement was totally up to Rosenstein on this.  There's a lot behind the scenes here, and we'll find out  at some point.

De Blasio De Criminal?

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio is now facing serious corruption allegations that came faster than, well, a New York minute.

A Long Island restaurateur testified under oath on Thursday that he steered tens of thousands of dollars to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s political campaigns in return for favorable treatment by the city. 

It was the first time that the restaurateur, Harendra Singh, has publicly detailed his efforts to use campaign contributions — as much as $80,000 raised from others, and much more personally by using “straw donors” to skirt contribution limits — to gain better terms during lease negotiations for one of his restaurants. 

Mr. Singh also suggested for the first time that Mr. de Blasio not only knew of the illegal arrangement, but that the mayor encouraged it and actively helped the restaurateur. 

“He made many phone calls,” Mr. Singh said of the mayor. “His office was working very hard, from his deputy mayor to his assistant to his intergovernmental affairs person. Everyone was working.”

Mr. Singh was testifying as a cooperating witness in the corruption trial of Edward Mangano, the former Nassau County executive, and John Venditto, the former Town of Oyster Bay supervisor, both of whom Mr. Singh has pleaded guilty to bribing.

Mr. Singh said that he and the mayor often discussed the lease and the donations in the same conversations. 

And on two occasions, the restaurateur testified, Mr. de Blasio requested contributions for himself or political allies and, when told that Mr. Singh had already met the limit, said: “Listen, I don’t want to know. Just do what you have to do.”

The Mangano/Venditto case has been a thorn in de Blasio's side for a while now.  But Singh's testimony makes things much harder for the mayor.  The issue now is that de Blasio may now be called to testify in the case, and if that happens, all bets are off.

We'll see, but if I were you I'd cross the guy off any 2020 short lists.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

In what should be the least surprising development in the ongoing investigation into Russian inference in the 2016 election, Spencer Ackerman and the Daily Beast are reporting that hacker Guccifer 2.0, the source behind the hacking of the DNC emails who gift-wrapped them for delivery to WikiLeaks, was an actual Russian GRU intelligence officer.

Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft. 

That forensic determination has substantial implications for the criminal probe into potential collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia. The Daily Beast has learned that the special counsel in that investigation, Robert Mueller, has taken over the probe into Guccifer and brought the FBI agents who worked to track the persona onto his team. 

While it’s unclear what Mueller plans to do with Guccifer, his last round of indictments charged 13 Russians tied to the Internet Research Agency troll farm with a conspiracy “for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.” It was Mueller’s first move establishing Russian interference in the election within a criminal context, but it stopped short of directly implicating the Putin regime. 

Mueller’s office declined to comment for this story. But the attribution of Guccifer 2.0 as an officer of Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency would cross the Kremlin threshold—and move the investigation closer to Trump himself.

There was zero doubt that Russia was behind the DNC hack, all of our intelligence agencies said so.  But now we know it was the GRU, Russia's equivalent of the CIA, that was running the show.  And that means there's no longer any question that the Trumpies were working with the Russians to go after Hillary.

Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger Stone admitted being in touch with Guccifer over Twitter’s direct messaging service. And in August 2016, Stone published an article on the pro-Trump-friendly Breitbart News calling on his political opponents to “Stop Blaming Russia” for the hack. “I have some news for Hillary and Democrats—I think I’ve got the real culprit,” he wrote. “It doesn’t seem to be the Russians that hacked the DNC, but instead a hacker who goes by the name of Guccifer 2.0.”

Roger Stone is in real trouble, guys.  And here's why:

“Almost immediately various cyber security companies and individuals were skeptical of Guccifer 2.0 and the backstory that he had generated for himself,” said Kyle Ehmke, an intelligence researcher at the cyber security firm ThreatConnect. “We started seeing these inconsistencies that led back to the idea that he was created hastily… by the individual or individuals that affected the DNC compromise.” 

Proving that link definitively was harder. Ehmke led an investigation at ThreatConnect that tried to track down Guccifer from the metadata in his emails. But the trail always ended at the same data center in France. Ehmke eventually uncovered that Guccifer was connecting through an anonymizing service called Elite VPN, a virtual private networking service that had an exit point in France but was headquartered in Russia. 

But on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with the government’s Guccifer investigation. Twitter and WordPress were Guccifer 2.0’s favored outlets. Neither company would comment for this story, and Guccifer did not respond to a direct message on Twitter. 

Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow. (The Daily Beast’s sources did not disclose which particular officer worked as Guccifer.)

This is as big as it gets, guys.  The Trumpies have been denying that the Russians were behind the DNC hack for 18 months now, and that's been a lie since the word go.  They worked to wreck Hillary's chances, and they worked with both Roger Stone and Julian Assange to do it.

But remember, the House Intelligence Committee closed their investigation because there was no evidence of Russian interference.

Mueller has all of this, guys.  It's going to be brutal.

The Blue Wave Rises

With the success of Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania, Democrats are now going for broke trying to put as many House districts in play, and that includes the one across the river here in Cincy as the race between Democrat Aftab Pureval and GOP Rep. Steve Chabot in OH-1 is now a prime pickup opportunity for Team Blue. The Enquirer's Jason Williams:

Washington Democrats have officially signaled they view Cincinnati's Aftab Pureval as a top-tier congressional candidate. 

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced Thursday it has made Pureval's battle against long-time incumbent Steve Chabot in Ohio's 1st Congressional District the organization's top targeted race in the Buckeye State – and one of its highest priorities nationally. 

The DCCC has decided to make 33 races nationwide its top priority, with Pureval's being the only one targeted in Ohio. 

“Aftab Pureval has already proven he can win tough races when he became the first Democratic Hamilton County Clerk of Courts in more than 100 years," DCCC Chairman Ben Ray Lujan, a Congressman from New Mexico, said in a statement. "With a strong base of local support, innovative ideas and a dedication to working for the people of Southwest Ohio, Aftab is poised to defeat yet another establishment Republican incumbent.” 

What it means: The DCCC will deploy resources to help Pureval, the former Procter & Gamble attorney running his first congressional campaign. That means Washington will provide fundraising support and assist the campaign in recruiting staff and volunteers. The DCCC will determine in the fall whether it will ratchet up its support for Pureval by pouring in its own money and deploying staffers to Ohio. 

Why this happened: Pureval had to raise a certain amount of money to trigger the DCCC's full involvement. His campaign has not disclosed what he's raised overall since jumping into the race in late January. But he quickly showed in his 2016 race against longtime Clerk of Courts Tracy Winkler that Pureval can raise big money.

In the first 24 hours after launching his congressional campaign, Pureval raised $130,000 – more than Chabot brought in during the entire fourth quarter of 2017.

And I know I trash the DCCC regularly because they have this terrible habit of picking garbage primary candidates to back and then leaving races entirely to the GOP when those garbage candidates can't even get past the primary. 

And yeah, eight years ago they left Democrat Steve Dreihaus out to dry in 2010 and surrendered the district to the GOP.  Now they come crawling back for the opportunity to knock off Chabot.  Ben Ray Lujan is even a bigger meathead than the previous DCCC chairs, Steve Israel and Chris Van Hollen.

But if the stars have aligned here for the DCCC to back Pureval against Chabot, then I'll take it.  Pureval, so far, seems like a pretty solid guy, certainly better than the anti-choice dipstick Chabot.

We'll see if the blue wave comes through Cincy or not, but the DCCC at least is putting down the money that it will.